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Dorrit ZuckerCohn

Professor of German and Comparative Literature

1924 – 2012

Dorrit Zucker was born in Vienna where her family owned successful businesses, such as manufacturing fezzes for the Turkish Army, berets that were sold in France, and furniture. A month before the Nazis invaded Austria, the Zuckers fled, first to Switzerland and then France before settling in New York City. After a sheltered, “dreamy” upbringing by French nannies, she enrolled at Radcliffe College where she received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1945 and a master’s degree in comparative literature the following year. She began graduate school in comparative literature at Yale, where she met her husband. After an 11-year hiatus while her two children were young, she completed her Ph.D. in German at Stanford. She came to Harvard in 1971, one of three women appointed to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that year.

Dorrit’s contributions to the field of narratology — the study of how fictional narrators render characters' inner lives — were foundational to the field and have become indispensible tools of literary analysis. Transparent Minds (1978) was a groundbreaking work. Her final book, The Distinction of Fiction (1999) is a prize-winning collection of essays.

by Abigail Gillman

As I recollect my relationship with Dorrit Cohn, what I come up with is not a continuous narrative, but a chain of discrete moments, encounters, and images. I knew Dorrit from a distance — the distance separating a very young graduate student and a senior scholar. When I began to assemble these encounters, and to recollect some of our conversations, I realized that they added up to something truly significant: the enormous impact she had on my life.

Our first conversation was a phone call from Dorrit when I was living in New York City, trying to decide whether to come to Harvard for graduate school. When I did come to Harvard’s German Department in 1987, Dorrit had already been assigned to be my advisor. This was the beginning of a warm and supportive relationship that lasted for almost twenty years.

A program from Dorrit Cohn's memorial service held at Harvard University on September 9, 2012.

It was a bit of a rocky start. In her seminars, which required us to read very, very long German novels, many of my essays were, unfortunately, still works in progress — I was still a work in progress, in those years — and my main memories of those days are of listening to her patient critiques and reading her neatly penciled-in corrections and comments.

When it came time to select a director for the dissertation, Dorrit did not take this for granted; it was raised very seriously in the Café Pamplona, where Dorrit told me that she planned to retire at age 70. Did I still want to work with her? The conversation stands out in my mind, since Dorrit didn’t often share her personal life. Another such exchange occurred when I was preparing for job interviews. Dorrit told me how difficult it had been to apply for jobs in academia as a divorced mother of two.

Of course, most of our conversations were about my dissertation. Dorrit took advising extremely seriously. Drafts were returned promptly, always with careful line editing and elaborate notes. I was writing about the problem of memory in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It was a large and diffuse topic, and we disagreed about the scope and structure of the thesis. As much as Dorrit shaped my understanding of modernism, memory, and genre, she also taught me about the need for balance, or what she called “symmetry,” of the thesis as a whole. Our meetings took place in a Cambridge cafe, in her Boylston Hall office, and in the summer, in her apartment on Mt. Auburn Street or in her home on Cape Cod.

Dorrit played an important role in my coming together with my husband Michael Prince. Michael was already teaching English at Boston University when we met each other by chance in Harvard Square on a Sunday morning in May 1991. Over our first coffee, we spoke about Dorrit’s 1969 article on the “Change of Person in Kafka’s Manuscript of The Castle.” Michael, usually a scholar of the British Enlightenment, happened to have written an essay about Kafka’s pronouns in which he disagreed with Dorrit’s theory. Michael hadn’t remembered my name from a prior encounter, but luckily he remembered that I was working on German modernism. Dorrit became very fond of Michael; I sensed that she couldn’t quite believe I had found myself such a fine husband.

Dorrit and I had a wonderful personal connection over all things Viennese — cakes, chocolate, art, music, and an ever-present sense of nostalgia and mystery. Dorrit grew up in an assimilated Viennese Jewish family, which, at the insistence of a wealthy uncle who had immigrated to South America, left Austria on February 3, 1938 — one month before the Anschluss. When Ruth Kluger published Still Alive, her memoir of a Jewish childhood in 1930s Vienna and during the Holocaust, Dorrit said simply that she read the book in one sitting. I wish I had taken the cue and asked her more directly about her own experiences. Now I read as many memoirs of Austrian Jews as I can get my hands on and think often about all that I don’t know about Dorrit’s Vienna years.

We connected, more obliquely, around Jewish culture. Whereas she seemed to find my religious observance — keeping kosher, not going to classes on the holidays — somewhat puzzling, she always encouraged my interests in Hebrew Bible and Jewish literature. When I had the opportunity to do research in Israel, she initiated a number of important contacts.

In my own work, I most value the example Dorrit set with her integrity, modesty, and precision in teaching, advising, and scholarship. She was respectful and generous with her time, and she never overstepped. She had high standards for us both, and she never faked it. From the very start, she pushed me to sharpen my ideas and to keep clear the boundaries between ideas. Terms and concepts had precise meanings and were to be used with great care; I tended to see much more of the gray haze between them, and I think I still do.

In later years Dorrit and I occasionally played tennis on the Harvard courts, but not often, because I was not nearly good enough for her. I visited her apartment with my young children, and she dined with us once in our home in Newton. Our very last lunch was at a restaurant in Harvard Square. I didn’t have tenure yet and my book was not yet published, but she was very pleased that both of those achievements were imminent. Dorrit was still very much still Dorrit.

It recently occurred to me that Dorrit taught us all an important life lesson: how to deal with change. This connects perhaps with her innate understanding of boundaries. She decided when it was the right time to retire; I also remember her telling me, “This will be my last trip to Europe.” I recall when she explained that in her retirement (and old age), she figured out that translation was the ideal kind of work for her. When she retired in 1995, she learned ancient Greek so she could read Plato’s dialogues in the original. Less well known is the fact that she contributed large sums of money to charity throughout her life, sponsoring children through organizations such as CARE.

In tribute to Dorrit, I end with a Hebrew verse from Yehuda Amichai — a poet born in Germany in the same year as she — from his last book Open Closed Open:

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are.

Abigail Gillman is Associate Professor of German and Hebrew at Boston University. She is the author of Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler (2009) and is currently writing a cultural history of the German Jewish Bible.

Quotes

"We shared something in being Jewish..."

There was a sense that we shared something in being Jewish. She was clear that this had nothing to do with religion, observance, connection to the Jewish calendar. When we'd have lunch together she'd talk about how the best thing for her to eat after an upset stomach was a ham sandwich. But she expressed a sense that Jewish identity was part of her sensibility.

I met her when I was a junior faculty member in the Comp Lit and English departments at Harvard. Dorrit was one of six women recruited as tenured faculty at Harvard in the early 1970s, and she saw it as her role to foster and support younger women faculty. [Dorrit and I] actually met and started talking in the Ladies Room on the top floor of Boylston Hall (we used to joke about it as the secret hideout for women faculty), where the Comp Lit and German Departments were both located. We got to be friends and socialized fairly regularly in a relaxed way.

When she first came to Harvard, her interest in theory was considered strange, accounted for by her European background… She was eager to introduce someone like me to those new ways of thinking and I owe her a tremendous amount intellectually as well as personally.